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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Celebrim" data-source="post: 9760855" data-attributes="member: 4937">I'm a bit baffled by this.  It's obviously about agency.  The issue is how do you have agency as a player if the GM is effectively all powerful and capable of using fiat to shape the fiction.  That's the core issue.  And the issue is that because of bias - which you've agreed on all my examples - a GM can't trust himself to not be shaping the story primarily according to his own whim and so must be careful when employing certain techniques in order to mitigate his own potential bias while still making the game fun.  But if we could imagine a situation where we know the GM isn't shaping the story to his own whim, then obviously we also know that he is not shaping the story to his own whim and therefore the players have agency.  Oh come on.  I will be frank.  You've offered up a definition that entirely relative and that acted like "I know it when I see it" is an adequate explanation, and now you are all puffed up and emotional about my suggestion that if a GM is sacrificing his own preferred story then at that moment he by definition can't be railroading is some novel or radical observation?  And now you've gone off on a rant that has nothing to do with time skips or hand waves and acted like that is somehow relevant to my point.Your own definition means nothing is a railroad if the players consent to it and everything is a railroad if they don't. And you complain my definitions are useless in the application?  Your whole standard is, "If I do it then it's not a railroad!" and you are utterly oblivious to any other opinion.  So don't get all high and mighty with me.So, hey, you can do basic things of dungeon mastering, but that is only in the most remote sense the same thing.  All you did there is follow the logic of your own scene that you created without being immature about it.  Congratulations, you aren't a jerk.  A computer could do the same thing, as you have pointed out (and in fact many computer boss fights do end up having some loophole or glitch you can exploit to trivialize them).  But the point of my hypothetical example would be closer to you agreeing to let the players say that they had won without actually running the fight.  Because remember, I was primarily talking about hand waves specifically as a technique, not just abstractly whether you would accept the consequences of your own fictional design without pulling some railroading technique out to subvert your own myth.See this is so telling.  The whole time we are talking you aren't really interested at all in understanding what I'm talking about.  The whole time, all your speech with me, all your argument is actually just proving to me (or yourself) that you aren't a railroader, which is of course never even something I considered under contention and isn't even an interesting topic of conversation.  You are here proclaiming victory over something irrelevant to me and suggests you haven't got a clue what I'm actually talking about you are just focused on your own emotional validation.None of your examples involved any railroading technique.  So why would you expect me to think that they were railroading?</blockquote>

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